Wow, I have to say, I am pretty damn blown away by how incredible Half-Life 2
is.... The only thing more impressive than turning out such an effort is doing
so after managing to do so much to raise expectations in advance. Just.... wow.

Thank you. I was going to beat him about the head for that. P4's have been running hotter (and thus using more power) than Athlon XPs, much less Athlon 64s, for quite some time.

The crap about Athlons running so hot started because they were running hotter than P3s (not P4s) and they didn't have a thermal limiter diode (remedied in the XP), so they wouldn't self-limit/turn off if they were running too hot.

Oh... and I'm running an Athlon64 3000+, 1G RAM, GF 6800GT, hard drive, and DVD+/-RW drive all on a 300W PSU. It used to be that you had to be careful about the 12V line, but I haven't seen a PSU made in the past 2-3 years that didn't have adequate power on all three rails.

Edit: On the other hand, my server which has 4-5 HDs, runs a 500W PSU. Could get by with less, but wanted expansion capacity. It has a monster 12V line though -- 25A.This comment was edited on Nov 18, 09:33.